Nearly Done With Burgos, On To Madrid!

Well, Burgos has all been a bit tomb-laden for me and so I gratefully hail Nathaniel's imminent return to the diligence and the open road.  He's headed for Madrid, which has an unrivalled collection of paintings...but not much else, he claims.  Before we reach it though the diligence, the road, the inns on the road and our fellow-passengers are all going to get a welcome mention.

But first, I thought my faithful reader might like a graphic depicting the route so far.  Here it is.

Literally no expense has been incurred in providing this.

From Burgos Nathaniel will travel due south to the capital, Madrid, and then take in Toledo before making a rapid three-day excursion up to Valladolid and back (route shown below).  This all represents quite an adventurous journey.  Travel was not just tiring but potentially dangerous, because apart from bad roads and rickety coaches, there were bandits.  He had no bottled water, no air-conditioning, he couldn't phone ahead to confirm anything, he was sketching as he went, and must have been making notes continually before composing his lengthy letters to Mrs C-----r.  Whatever else we can accuse him of - a tendency to mansplain, a weakness for tombs - idle he is certainly not. 

The completion of the above route will bring us to the middle of the book, and also to the end of the fourteen letters he wrote exclusively to his unidentified lady friend. It will not bring us to the end of his travels though, because he actually made an earlier trip to Spain in which he sailed along its Mediterranean coast to Cadiz, and then explored the southern interior.  Why he chose to write up his two journeys in reverse order, I'm not sure.  Perhaps it allowed him to describe Spain diagonally from north to south, as a future tourist might choose to explore it. 

Now and Then

Then: what Nathaniel saw

Now: it has changed a bit, I agree.

The discrepancy between these two images is not due to Nathaniel's bad drawing skills: the fountain apparently did look different back then.  It had clearly been in the wars, in every sense. According to Nathaniel, when he saw it you couldn't even tell what those four fragmented, beaten-up Cupids were meant to be riding on.

Looking at the modern photo we can see the basin and central column rising from it aren't much altered, but the Cupids and their dolphins(?) have been heavily restored, and there has clearly been a significant rebuild at the top.  Even in Nathaniel's day, when the little statue surmounting the fountain was so damaged the Christ child had vanished altogether, there was  a visible difference in colour between the lower part of the fountain and the upper: so it seems the lower part is much older. The original design is perhaps impossible to guess.  Would an earlier age have chosen to place the vaguely erotic symbols of Cupids and Melusines beneath a statue of the Virgin?   I can't say.  Anyway, as Nathaniel described it:

"This little antique monument charms, by the quaint symmetry of its design and proportions, and perhaps even by the terribly mutilated state of the four fragments of Cupids, which, riding on the necks of the same number of animals so maltreated as to render impossible the discovery of their race, form projecting angles, and support the basin on their shoulders. Four mermaids, holding up their tails, so as not to interfere with the operations of the Cupids, ornament the sides of the basin, which are provided with small apertures for the escape of the water; the top being covered by a flat circular stone, carved around its edge. This stone,—a small, elegantly shaped pedestal, which surmounts it,—and the other portions already described, are nearly black, probably from antiquity; but on the pedestal stands a little marble virgin, as white as snow. This antique figure harmonises by its mutilation with the rest, although injured in a smaller degree; and at the same time adds to the charm of the whole, by the contrast of its dazzling whiteness with the dark mass on which it is supported. The whole is balanced on the capital of a pillar, of a most original form, which appears immediately above the surface of a sheet of water enclosed in a large octagonal basin."

"Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me"

Heroes! We all have them. Personal and national heroes, men who mirror to us the qualities we most envy, the ones we fervently wish we had ourselves.  But heroism is like taffeta, it is not the same in all lights. A man devoutly admired by one group can be an object of passionate scorn, or even downright hate, to another.  Through Nathaniel's eyes we are about to meet the greatest hero of Christian Spain - El Cid.

"The hero is represented in the most extraordinary of attitudes: the head is thrown back, and the face turned towards one side; the legs in a sort of studied posture; a drawn sword is in the right hand, the point somewhat raised. The general expression is that of a comic actor attempting an attitude of mock-heroic impertinence; and is probably the result of an unattained object in the mind of the artist, of producing that of fearless independence."

This is Nathaniel's damning verdict on an oil painting of El Cid that once hung in the Ayuntamiento - not a very good one it seems.  It was presumably put there by those who genuinely wished to honour the great man whose bones rested amongst them.   But Nathaniel has no time for this picture.  To him it's an artistic failure, rubbish.

Only, is it just the picture he has no time for?  Really he is not just dissing whatever poor provincial artist attempted the likeness of Spain's great preserver: inevitably, by association, he is ridiculing the hero himself. 

El Cid statue in the centre of modern Burgos

This is an unpopular viewpoint, at least in the west.  The statue above was put up only sixty years ago, a mere six years before Hollywood canonised El Cid in the person of Charlton Heston. Like the film, it aims to show El Cid as the magnificent champion of Christian Spain against the Moors, and that is still very much how he is seen by many in Spain today.  But we soon learn that, for Nathaniel, El Cid's hero status is overblown, ambiguous,  untrustworthy - undeserved.

"For those who are satisfied with the orthodox histories of the monks, he is without defects—a simple unsophisticated demi-god. But there have been Mahometan historians of Spain. These are universally acknowledged to have treated of all that concerned themselves with complete accuracy and impartiality; and, when this happens, it should seem to be the best criterion, in the absence of other proof, of their faithful delineation of others' portraits."

The icon of one group will often be the hate figure of another.  I am sensing something significant about Nathaniel, which is that he loves Spain so much not for its triumphant Christian past, but for its lost Moorish civilization. His derogatory attitude to El Cid is the litmus test which proves something profound about him.

Deep, deep  down,  Nathaniel Armstrong Wells Esq. of Piercefield, Monmouthshire, wishes the Africans had won.

"She's the best of her kind, but her kind is not the best."

We are on our way out of the cathedral at Burgos, pausing at the door for a final, lingering, critical glance:

... "not forgetting to enjoy, as we leave the church, a long gaze at its elegant and symmetrical proportions. It may be called an unique model of beauty of its particular sort, especially when contemplated without being drawn into comparison with other edifices of a different class. Catalani is said, on hearing Sontag's performance, to have remarked that she was "la première de son genre, mais que son genre n'était pas le premier." Could the cathedral of Seville see that of Burgos, it would probably pronounce a similar judgment on its smaller rival."

Angelica Catalani, singer: (1780-1849)

Come again, Nathaniel - Catalani? Sontag?

Okay, Wikipedia tells me who Catalani was, the famous Italian soprano on the left. "Sontag" presumably is Henriette Sontag, a rival songstress Catalani damned with faint praise: her remark translates something like "she's the best of her kind, but her kind is not the best."

He's recalling the judgment of a famous but faded soprano who was already in her sixties as he journeys confidently through Spain, pronouncing so robustly on its architectural charms.  (We know, he doesn't, that the old lady singer he quotes will still outlive him by three years.)

So: the Cathedral of Burgos is very lovely, and if he hadn't already seen the one at Seville Nathaniel would have have been utterly bowled over by it.  As it is, yes, perfectly charming, but - he has seen better.

So we turn our backs on the Cathedral of Burgos and head across the hot stones of the square towards the Ayuntamiento.  This is the Town Hall, and in itself not interesting enough to detain jaded aesthetes like us:

 "The building, like other town-halls, possesses an airy staircase, a large public room, and a few other apartments, used for the various details of administration; but nothing remarkable until you arrive at a handsomely ornamented saloon, furnished with a canopied seat fronting a row of arm-chairs. This is the room in which the municipal body hold their juntas."

We are heading there because surprisingly, the Town Hall of Burgos is where we shall find the remains of Spain's greatest hero - a man whose fame reached even 20th century Hollywood.

We are going to pay our respects at the grave of El Cid.

We don't like the clergy much, unless they're made of stone

He is rambling round this dark and probably echoing interior.  Vaulted stone is overhead. To describe what he sees he is using precise terminology, not all of which is penetrable, e.g. "The transept has no lateral naves."

This conveys nothing to me, and there is much more like it, so my eye quickly skims down to his next illustration.

Now, this I like.  This says gloom, and grandeur, and gothic. The pygmy human figures give scale to its magnificence while the strong Spanish sunlight plummets into the space beyond like a waterfall into a subterranean cavern.  Young ladies at home in Victorian parlours could sigh over this and wistfully imagine themselves as nuns, gliding about in a holy way with sexily downcast eyes.

Nathaniel would probably have taken a second look at a nun, but in general seems to find the clergy unimpressive, because here he drops in one of his little asides about a couple of quarrelling bishops:

"Don Pedro Fernandez de Frias, Cardinal of Spain... was, it is affirmed, of low parentage, of base and licentious habits of life, and of a covetous and niggardly disposition. These defects, however, by no means diminished the high favour he enjoyed at the successive courts of Henry the Third and Juan the Second. The Bishop of Segovia, Don Juan de Tordesillas, happened by an unlucky coincidence to visit Burgos during his residence there. The characters of the two prelates were not of a nature to harmonise in the smallest degree, and, being thrown necessarily much in each other's way, they gave loose occasionally to expressions more than bordering on the irreverent. It was on one of these occasions, that, the eloquence of the Cardinal Bishop here interred being at default, a lacquey of his followers came to his assistance, and being provided with a palo, or staff, inflicted on the rival dignitary certain arguments ad humeros—in fact, gave the Bishop of Segovia a severe drubbing. The Cardinal was on this occasion compelled to retire to Italy."

So much for undignified dignitaries.  But soon he comes across a clergyman he really does like - a carving decorating an arch.  It is a cowled head, perhaps meant to represent St. Francis :

"The attention is instantly rivetted by this head: it is not merely a masterpiece of execution. Added to the exquisite beauty and delicate moulding of the upper part of the face, the artist has succeeded in giving to the mouth an almost superhuman expression. This feature, in spite of a profusion of hair which almost covers it, lives and speaks. A smile, in which a barely perceptible but irresistible and, as it were, innate bitterness of satire and disdain modifies a wish of benevolence, unites with the piercing expression of the eyes in lighting up the stone with a degree of intellect which I had thought beyond the reach of sculpture until I saw this head. Tradition asserts it to be a portrait of Saint Francis, who was at Burgos at the period of the completion of the cathedral; and who, being in the habit of examining the progress of the works, afforded unconsciously a study to the sculptor."

He draws it, as you see: but by the time the head has passed through his hands and those of the artist who transferred his work into etchings, I can't see what's so great about it. Nor can I find the original in google images. Has it gone?

"Grace, symmetry, grandeur and lightness"

LETTER IV.

ARRIVAL AT BURGOS. CATHEDRAL.

" Nothing can exceed the beauty of this front taken as a whole."

We are finally at Burgos, admiring its cathedral.  Well no, more than that: we're examining it with the judicious and discerning eye of a man of taste.

For comparison, I include here a link to tripadvisor's site on the same historic edifice.  On the day I visited it a tourist had left the comment "Interesting.  As cathedrals go, this is a nice example..."

Yes, well, that's about what my own response would be, but Nathaniel does it all in a bit more depth.  He analyses the cathedral's layout, sketches its history and speaks with knowledgeable enthusiasm of it - or of parts of it, anyway.  Something a bit tragic apparently happened to the centre tower, which fell down and was completed by several architects in a later style.  The style is not exactly bad, but it is different: "Taken by itself, the tower is, both externally and internally, admirable, from the elegance of its form, and the richness of its details; but it jars with the rest of the building."

Dammit. Only six out of ten for you, Centre Tower! About the West Front (above) though he has no reservations whatever:

"Here nothing is required to be added, or taken away, to afford the eye a feast as perfect as grace, symmetry, grandeur, and lightness, all combined, are capable of producing. Nothing can exceed the beauty of this front taken as a whole."

"Grace, symmetry, grandeur and lightness".  It seems these are the qualities that combine to make an outstanding piece of Gothic architecture.  And apparently it's so satisfying because it starts off very solid and simple, only becoming ornamental at the first story; is then even more richly adorned at the third level; and from there the two beautiful towers rise...

"connected by a screen, which masks the roof, raising the apparent body of the façade an additional story. This screen is very beautiful, being composed of two ogival windows in the richest style, with eight statues occupying the intervals of their lower mullions. A fourth story, equally rich, terminates the towers, on the summits of which are placed the two spires. These are all that can be wished for the completion of such a whole. "

Looking at the picture above...yes, I can sort of see what he means.


"They are, I imagine, not only unmatched, but unapproached by any others, in symmetry, lightness, and beauty of design. The spire of Strasburg is the only one I am acquainted with that may be allowed to enter into the comparison...."

But he quickly adds that even the spire at Strasbourg doesn't quite equal Burgos anyway. Granted it's twice as big, and yet still possesses an airy lightness, but "the symmetry of its outline is defective, being uneven, and producing the effect of steps. And then it is alone, and the absence of a companion gives the façade an unfinished appearance. For these reasons I prefer the spires of Burgos."

(You can compare them by going to this site dedicated to the Cathedral of Strasbourg. And to be honest, I think he's right.)

And we have learned a new word: "ogival", meaning ...pointy-arched.

In my end is my beginning.

So, starting from the end.  This is a copy of Nathaniel's burial record, taken from the net.  And there's something mightily depressing about seeing it in black and white.  Obviously, since he was born in 1806, I was never going to contact him on facebook, but... this is sad.  And why is this much-travelled man being buried in Edgbaston of all places?  And why do they appear to have his age wrong in the burial record - oh but that's minor, clerical errors happen all the time. But why in Edgbaston?

A mystery put aside for another day.  Let's go back gratefully to Nathaniel still alive and receiving impressions and transferring them onto paper, for long-term storage and the ultimate pleasure of people not alive when he was breathing that Pyrenean air.

He's travelling through Basque country to Burgos, ancient capital of Castile. And it's quite...small.

"The extent of Burgos bears a very inadequate proportion to the idea formed of it by strangers, derived from its former importance and renown. It is composed of five or six narrow streets, winding round the back of an irregularly shaped colonnaded plaza. The whole occupies a narrow space, comprised between the river Arlançon, and the almost circular hill of scarcely a mile in circumference, (on which stands the citadel) and covers altogether about double the extent of Windsor Castle."

 He adds that the medieval town has "received a sort of modern facing, consisting of a row of regularly built white houses, which turn their backs to the Plaza, and front the river"

Perhaps those "regularly built" modern houses of his are now bijou holiday lets, renting on the strength of their cute antiquity?  Maybe they've vanished under concrete.  A quick visit via the net to modern Burgos (...aaargh my god it's huge!! No, no it's not: but bigger, yes, obviously bigger.  Has an airport and everything.  Still looks a great place for a tourist though, and still possesses all those creamy white historic buildings and some narrow medievally streets.)

He gets a little prickly about the small size of his Burgos.  We must not patronise it, we Brits, despite its surprising, ah, compactness to our Victorian eyes, which are more used to the great suburban sprawl of London or Brum, or Edgbaston.  But you couldn't build cities as neatly as this in Britain though because of all the rain...:

"The dimensions of this, and many other Spanish towns, must not be adopted as a base for estimating their amount of population. Irun, at the frontier of France, stands on a little hill, the surface of which would scarcely suffice for a country-house, with its surrounding offices and gardens: it contains, nevertheless, four or five thousand inhabitants, and comprises a good-sized market-place and handsome town-hall, besides several streets. Nor does this close packing render the Spanish towns less healthy than our straggling cities, planned with a view to circulation and purity of atmosphere...The humidity of the atmosphere in England would be the principal obstacle to cleanliness and salubrity, had the towns a more compact mode of construction; whilst in Spain, on the contrary, this system is advantageous as a protection against the excessive power of the summer sun, which would render our wide streets—bordered by houses too low to afford complete shade—not only almost impassable, but uninhabitable."


Okay.  Small is not only beautiful in Spain, but also populous, dry, well-planned, hygienic and shady.  Because it's Spain, and we love Spain.

Which brings us to Nathaniel's first attempt to render a picturesque antiquity visually, the Arco de Santa Maria.  What do you think of him as an artist?

Spain, thank god, Spain!

Letter III

For me he spoils the mood at the opening of this letter by having an exasperated, unnecessary - and to be honest, quite snotty - crack at the British consul in Bayonne.  Apparently to get into Spain required a visa. (Who knew? It's the 1840s. I didn't know they'd invented visas. But the earliest example of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is only 1831.)

Anyway, to cross the border required a visa from the consul - and it wasn't free. After a few heavily ironic remarks about the  self-importance of the entire consular class ("I have heard one, certainly far from being high on the list of these functionaries, termed...the 'Premier Consul') Nathaniel icily points out these jacks-in-office are still grubbing after your money. Well, probably not much money goes with consulling, he sniffs, .- though even if the income is limited "one is usually in a cheap place" (i.e., not Paris, not London, not anywhere a man of taste would wish to live.  No, consuls dwell in shitholes.)  Still, he reflects, it must be demeaning for such an august official to be under the obligation of "holding out his hand for his fee".  Fortunately Her Majesty's  consul in Bayonne has developed his own method of hitting on you.  He starts by elaborately regretting the necessity for such a stupid piece of paperwork - totally pointless, he'd memoed the Foreign Office about it himself - but quite indispensable, my dear sir, absolutely vital - could be turned back at the border without this! - and (significant look) to think it costs three francs, too! 

Three francs lighter and still resentful, Nathaniel is ready for Spain.  And suddenly, suddenly his mood is changing.  Everything is about to change.

"From the first view of Spanish ground, the monotony of the landscape ceases, and gives place to picturesque scenery.  This effect is as sudden as if produced by the whistle of a scene-shifter. From the brow of a hill the valley of the Bidassoa opens on the view, the bay on the right, two or three towns in the centre, and beyond them, stretching to the left, the chain of the Pyrenees.  This opening scene is very satisfactory to the newly arrived traveller, whose expectations have been rising towards fever-heat as he gradually neared the object of his dreams - the "renowned romantic land"..."

1823 view of the Valley of the Bidassoa

Fever-heat? The object of his dreams?  The renowned romantic land?  This doesn't sound like an objective trip to check medieval architecture. This is true love.

Vignette: Hot Chocolate at 3 a.m.

And now comes one of the little jewels of his book, brief and almost throwaway details about how he's travelling.  He's going by the public Diligence - from pictures, apparently a sort of long-bodied coach divided into small compartments, drawn by four horses - though the horses have been swapped for ten mules now they're in Spain. The daily schedule seems bizarre at first.  They start at 3 a.m., stop in the early afternoon, unwind for a couple of hours then eat a 'Homerically plentiful' supper, and then, maybe at only seven in the evening

"...all gradually retire to their sleeping apartments, where they are undisturbed until two o'clock in the morning.

At this hour each passenger is furnished with a candle, and requested to get up; and at a quarter to three the muchacha (chambermaid) reappears, bearing in her hand a plate, on which, after rubbing his eyes, the traveller may discover...an imperceptible cup, a xicara, - since having the thing, they have a name for it, which is of course untranslateable, - of excellent chocolate, an azucarillo (almost transparent sugar prepared for instantaneous melting), a glass of water, and a piece of bread.  After partaking of this agreeable refreshment, you have just time left to pay your bill, fold up your passport, which during the night has remained in the hands of the police, and to take your seat in the Diligence."

Right. I get the unusual hours, because we're in Spain and those mules can't travel in the torrid heat of the day.  The Diligence has to start early and journey through the cool hours before and after dawn. But I just love the glimpse of him woken at two, the meagre glow of a candle to dress by; then the knock on the door from the muchacha bearing his little mug of hot chocolate, the transparent azucarillo (I have a mental image of a sugar lump like an uncut diamond), the glass of cool water, the bread.  That bread must have been baked fresh close nearby.  It has not been transported in a refrigerated truck from somewhere in Belgium or France, it is local in a way bread may never be again. This Spain is gone, so far gone into the past: only through Nathaniel can you find your way there again. And look at the Spanish words creeping in, too, like magical incantations: muchacha, azucarillo, xicara.

It is because of this passage I now have a moderate hot chocolate habit, having researched how the Spanish make this drink, i.e. thick, dark and gloopy. 

Coping with Victorian prose

You can find Well's entire book online where I found it, at Project Gutenberg. A warning, though. Wells was a Victorian, so he wrote Victorian prose.  It can be daunting, especially if you strike something like this in the opening sentence:

"The author of the following letters is aware that his publication would have possessed greater utility, had the architectural descriptions been more minute. He ventures to hope, however, that this imperfection may be in some measure balanced by the more extended sphere opened to whatever information it may contain."

All he means is, he knows he hasn't written the Ultimate Guide to Spanish Architecture, because though that might have been very, very useful for a few architecture fans, this way at least his book will reach a wider audience.

Don't be intimidated by his prose. It's only English.

He warns us that, while not a primer on Spanish architecture, his book is also not some titillating account drooling over 'exotic' Spain. It does not contain Men In Pointy Hoods Doing Weird Catholic Stuff. Instead he claims to stick to honest facts:"...it was his wish to paint what he saw as he saw it."  But without being dull, because even though avoiding deliberate romantic invention he hopes "to enliven it by the introduction of any incidents worthy of notice which came under his observation".

He explains his book is based on letters he sent during two separate journeys to Spain made three years apart, and admits to a change made in the chronological sequence to shape his volume better.

The explanatory Preface is over, and we're into Letter I.

This is addressed to a lady, 'Mrs C-----r', and he is writing to her from the Rue de Richelieu, the most fashionable street in Paris (I told you the Wells family was rich).  From his remarks to her we can build up a picture of what sort of lady Mrs C-----r is.  She attends balls: between quadrilles she makes sparkling conversation with her partners, who have all been to smart places like Biarritz: and she is certainly no blue-stocking, as she blithely admits she knows nothing at all about Spain :  "You professed also, with a modesty always becoming to talent and worth, a complete ignorance respecting Spain...Indeed, the ignorance you profess with some exaggeration, is more or less general in our country."

- So Mrs C----r too is British?

"Spain has been unnoticed and unknown—laid on the shelf with the Arabian Nights—considered a sort of fabulous country, which it would be charming to know, but with which there would never be a chance of forming an acquaintance; and you have contented yourself with a sort of general information respecting it, derived from a few romances and poems...with the addition of some confused visions, in which autos-da-fé and dungeons contrast in a rather gloomy background with laughing majas, whirling their castagnettes to the soft cadences of guitars..."  

(Bullseye, Nathaniel. Women in frilly frocks doing stampy dancing, and the Inquisition lurking in the background. This remained the basic British idea of Spain until the day of the cheap package holiday arrived.)

He reflects with mock-solemnity on how wrong it would be for him to deliberately fool her about this unknown country, because there is absolutely no chance she will ever go there herself to check.  Spain is hot.  Mrs C-----r doesn't do heat.  She nearly had a meltdown recently during a brief spell of warmish weather in Normandy, remember? The time when she was staying in that old wood-panelled chateau, and insisted he shout his conversation to her from a different room entirely because it was so hot she couldn't bear to have any other living being in the same chamber. She even banned her pet dog: "...your favourite of favourites, Caliph, repulsed and uncaressed, hung his silken ears, as he solemnly retreated to coil himself on a distant rug..."

At this point it crosses my suspicious mind that 'Mrs C-----r' may be a literary fiction.  Is Nathaniel just inventing her to provide an excuse for his decision to publish a book about Spain?  To impress us that he is not writing for cash, god forbid, or for personal prestige because, oh no no, he is an English Gentleman Amateur! he wouldn't care about such things.  He is writing to amuse this charming, bored lady stretched on her chaise-longue amid the fatiguing Parisian heat.  He is her Knight Errant, adventuring to Spain for the pleasure of his capricious dame. So he would not dream of boring her (or us) with long, confusing lists of kings called Juan. Instead he is giving her a virtual tour of Spain c. 1842. He can do the same for us.

No, actually I do believe she exists, with her draughty chateau, her shared enthusiasm for Gothic monuments and aversion to heat.  So: he has recently been keeping company with a quadrille-loving but languorous British lady who can afford the rent of a Louis XIV house in or near Caen; she has at least one upmarket pet, the adored Caliph (probably a spaniel - the silken ears give it away); and apparently she and Nathaniel have been enjoying not only the summer "season of insects and al-fresco suppers" together, but "the autumnal equinox" too, complete with its roaring fires and roaring draughts. Cosy.

I notice there doesn't seem to be any Mr C-----r  mentioned.

Not Mrs C-----r, but from the same period.

NATHANIEL ARMSTRONG WELLS (1806 -1846)

Travel writer. Gentleman. Aesthete.  

Son and heir to the High Sheriff of Monmouthshire. 

- And, unusually for a wealthy Victorian gentleman, also black.
 

Nathaniel Armstrong Wells had the great good luck to be born to wealth and privilege - born into the heart of the English Regency.  He was luckier still in having a cultivated and intelligent mind, and in adult life brought it to bear on the societies of at least three European nations – his own, and those of France and Spain. Some of what he thought and felt he put into a book, The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain. This blog is an exploration of that book.

 

I call him black, but Wells would have been known in his own time as a 'quadroon': somebody with three-quarters European and a quarter African heritage.  In the binary world of racism however percentages tend not to matter.  Wells was visibly not 'white', and what was not white could only therefore be black.  So: black, clever, and privileged, but growing up in a 19th century Britain wedded to the idea of hierarchy - of rich over poor, of white over black, British over foreign.  This message, even when it wasn't being flatly stated out loud, was always in the background hum of the culture.  Was Wells deaf to it?  Most of his countrymen absorbed it untroubled: it was not in their interest to question it.  Did he? Or did he choose to be selectively deaf, to revel in his privileges of rank while pretending not to apply to himself the frequent slights against people of colour?

Let's find out.  Join me as, armed only with the entire internet, we explore this dead man's mind. 

THE WELLS FAMILY OF PIERCEFIELD

First, something of his background. Nathaniel Armstrong Wells was born in 1806, the year the slave trade was outlawed, but was over thirty when slavery itself was finally banned throughout the empire (1838).  Black people in Britain were never slaves in the same way as those in the colonies, but tended to be at least in service. Very much against the run of the odds, how did a black man get to be a wealthy gentleman? How did Nathaniel's father come to own the most splendid estate in Monmouthshire?

Slavery was at the root of both their privilege and colour.  Nathaniel's grandfather, a Welsh gentleman called William Wells, made a fortune in the West Indies: but his grandmother was an enslaved woman called Juggy.  When William Wells died he had several living children (by different mothers) to provide for, and he did: but all the others were girls. And if you remember your Austen, girls tended to be granted modest bequests, while the lion's share of a family fortune invariably went to the eldest son. 

William's only surviving son was Juggy's boy, our Nathaniel's father, who though island-born was despatched to England for his education.  After he completed that, and spent an elegantly idle season or two in London and Bath, he married Miss Harriet Este, daughter of one of the King's Chaplains. Time to begin a family, and also put his great fortune to work by buying an estate. He chose Piercefield, in his father's native Wales, in a land where he had ancestral ties.  Simply by being Piercefield's owner he went straight to the top of the county's hierarchy, eventually becoming a magistrate, High Sheriff, then Deputy Lieutenant.  It was all a very predictable path for a man of his wealth, but always there was the unexpected twist of his colour:  

"Mr Wells is a West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a Negro."  

That was the surprised diary entry made by the landscape artist Joseph Farington, after he had sought and got permission from the owner to visit Piercefield's famously-beautiful grounds. Despite their position and their riches, the Wells family were always liable to be dogged by that kind of response.